Bringing the inside, outside

No garden in Australia is truly complete if it does not have a place to relax and BBQ with friends. In our quest to make full use of this opportunity of having a garden, we decided to add this aspect too.

Boxing day sales are famous in Australia for great bargains, so we went in search during that period. We saw many BBQ ranges, there are many options to choose to from! First, we had an option of fuel - coal or gas. Then was the number of burners. And finally, we had to decide whether we needed a stove on the side or not. It was a difficult choice, but we made it in the end.

New BBQ

Next was the seating. This was simpler and we knew that we wanted six chairs. The only difficulty was the selection of a colour for the umbrella because the choice was limited (read: boring!), so we were stuck with black. Finally, we also bought an outdoor kennel for the dogs so that they had a shady spot to relax in.

Doggie kennel

We tried out the BBQ the day it arrived. And to complete the Australian tradition, we hosted a BBQ party on Australia day.

Meanwhile, our first potatoes and coriander were ready! The tomato plant was also flowering, so the tomatoes were not far away either. We had a taste of them and it was so much better than the store bought veggies. The first harvest really brought home the fact that growing your own vegetables is really worth the effort.

First potatoes

Coriander

Tomato flowers

Update:  June 2013
Strong winds in Melbourne toppled over our outdoor seating. The umbrella caught the wind and flew off, shattering the glass. The winds were so strong that the chairs flew off too! We had to replace the table and umbrella with a new set, this time we had a brighter coloured umbrella.

Outdoor seating destroyed by strong winds

Umbrella blown away

Shattered glass of the table top

New outdoor seating

Fruition of our ideas

Gardening is almost Australia's national pastime! I discovered that only when we started working in our garden and discussed it at work. A colleague told me about Morrison's nursery which was very popular. Another colleague told me about Bulleen Art & Garden nursery, whose abbreviation is coincidentally BAAG, which means 'garden' in Hindi. We decided to visit both and expand our plant collection.

Morrison's nursery was owned by two brothers who grew up on an orchard farm on that land. The farm had been in their family since 1944 and they started the nursery in 1979. The speciality of the nursery were the fruit trees owing to their upbringing and this is what we set our sights on. We did not have any particular fruit trees in mind, we just wanted to have a look. Their collection really surprised us though! They had the expected citrus family trees like lemon, lime, oranges, etc. But they also had guava and pomegranate, two fruits that are rarely seen in Melbourne. Along with an orange tree, we bought one of each of the pomegranate and guava!

Guava

Pomegranate

Orange

Our next stop was at BAAG. They are more than just a nursery, they have a lot of sculptures and other things that can be used in a garden. We set our sights on their native plant collection though and bought a plant called Kangaroo paw. It is a native plant and has velvety flowers that resemble a kangaroo's paw. It attracts birds to the garden. We also bought a couple of native shrubs from a species called Hebe. Pictured below are Emerald Green and Pretty N Pink.

Emerald Green - Hebe

Kangaroo Paw

Pretty N Pink - Hebe

By this time, our vegetables had begun to take shape! We could harvest the first lot of methi leaves and were beginning to see the potatoes taking root. It was the start of summer and we were looking forward to more harvests!

Methi

Seed of an idea

The temptation to grow some vegetables was too much! We had a really long garden bed, so why not?

We wanted a raised one to keep the dogs from getting into it. But our sunny spot in the garden had a downward slope. Thankfully, we found Birdie's raised garden bed, which was perfect! We assembled it, filled it with soil and were all set. On the way, we picked up the 42nd edition of Yates Garden Guide book. It was written for the Australian environment and covers everything from pests, propagation and watering to a comprehensive plant index suited to the local climate. It also has some great tips from other gardeners which I found very useful.

Now on to picking the vegetables! Naturally, it makes sense to pick the ones that we eat. But not all the ones we eat are easy to grow. For example, cabbages, carrots, onions and cauliflowers need so much space and they can be harvested only for a short time. And some of the others that we eat, are not available here like mooli (white radish), bhindi (okra) etc. So, we started with the very basic one - potato.

I got some good information from the Seed to Plate website, which gave information about various vegetables and how to grow them at home. Potato is the easiest to grow and also helps prepare the soil for other fussier vegetables. We did not buy the seed potatoes which are disease resistant because there were just too many in the bag. After all, I did not want to start a farm! We just planted a couple of sprouting potatoes from our veggie shopping. We also planted a few seeds of methi (fenugreek) and dhania (coriander) with the seeds picked from our spice rack. They all started sprouting up plants in two weeks!

Seed to plant - methi sprouts

Seed to plant - methi with leaves

Seed to plant - potato shoot

Seed to plant - potato plant

I mentioned in the previous post to resist the temptation to buy additional items when you buy plants. I learnt that lesson - and then promptly unlearnt it in the next trip! We bought a seed tray and some seeding soil mix, along with various seeds. In the end, the purchase was worth it as gave us the opportunity to try our hand at growing many vegetables. In the picture below you can see cauliflower, coriander, mint, carrot, onion, chilli and pumpkin.

Seed raising box

Seed to plant - Onion

Seed to plant - Mint

Seasoned gardeners may know that not all of these vegetables grow in the same season. But, we were novices and did not know that. We got seedlings from all of them, but some could not survive the exposure in the veggie patch. We also bought Basil and Chilli plants.

Chilli

Basil

Our final purchase was a lime tree. Lime is quite expensive in Australia but we eat them a lot, so this was a good investment. We looked forward to eating our first home-grown vegetables!

Lime

A green shopping list

So, there we were, standing in the garden section of Bunnings and wondering what to do because the plants on our list were unavailable! That was our first lesson.

Lesson 1: Have a plan B when the local nursery doesn't stock the plant you want.

Lilly Pilly

Anyway, there were enough knowledgeable people around who could help us pick out something else. We came home with a native tree called Lilly Pilly. It was to be our screening plant (or neighbours-be-gone as called in Australia!). It was already 3 feet tall and expected to grow by a foot every year.We ended up buying a native plant specific fertilizer and a Lilly Pilly disease resistant tablet and also learnt our second lesson in the process.

Lesson 2: The nursery will sell you all sorts of paraphernalia that you don't need.

The Lilly Pilly was so big that it took us novices the better part of the evening to plant it. It took us a couple of hours to get it out of the pot itself! We were trying to beat the sunset but could not finish the mammoth task before it became dark. After struggling to plant such a big (and extremely expensive) tree, we decided to never buy a mature plant.

Lesson 3: Better to grow a plant from seed or a cutting, than to waste money on a mature plant.

Having learnt some new lessons in life, our second purchase was much more practical. We bought young plants of African Daisy, Myoporum and a different kind of Lilly Pilly. These were intended to flank the Lilly Pilly tree. The Myoporum is an Australian native ground cover, we wanted to use it as a garden bed edging. The African daisy was going to give some cheer all year round with random flowering. We were very pleased with the final result.

Our loot!

African Daisy

Before mulch

There was one last thing to do which is a typical garden addition in Australia - mulch. Mulch is widely used in the garden beds and serves a dual purpose of preventing evaporation and preventing weeds from growing. It gave a very nice finish to the garden bed.

After mulch

Cementing our place in the gardening world

As we are told several times on "Better Homes and Gardens", when you want to makeover an area, you should always start by removing everything. A quick phone call to our landlord, and all was agreed upon. The old bushes and the lawn had to go. It was also decided that the patch behind the house should be cemented over. The only thing that stayed was the structure of the raised garden beds. A team was hired to execute this operation. The doggies were a bit disappointed at having been locked up inside the house for three days, but in the end we had a clean slate outside.

Work in progress

Work in progress

Work in progress

We needed a new lawn, which was arriving on the weekend. Our first ever gardening task was to level the soil where the turf would be laid. It rained all week and I am ashamed to say that I let the weather get the better of me, so Anshuman did all the levelling.

The turf arrived on the Saturday. It was a new experience for us, we had never seen a lawn being formed before. First, the rectangles of turf had to be laid out to cover the soil. Then, ideally a roller should be rolled across to level it and remove air pockets. We did not have one, so we just walked over it. Finally, we watered it every day for the roots to set. After two weeks of hard work (mainly by someone else!), we had a brand new garden to work with. The time for planning had started!

Laying of turf

We planned our garden several times - both on paper and virtually. There are various free online tools, but we used Garden Planner to start with. It was a pretty cool tool, they have tonnes of options to add to the layout like trees, shrubs, flowers, lawns, building, vegetables etc. It had a grid and each addition could be adjusted to the actual size. It gave us a very decent idea of what we could fit in our garden.

Next we made a paper layout, which allowed us to edit more. We had grand ambitions of a veggie patch, a garden full of flowers and trees to block out the neighbours spying on us. But, as Hercule Poirot says, we had to approach this with 'order and method'! First, we had to decide what we wanted as permanent features in the garden, as both vegetables and flowers have short lives. It was fun researching on the internet for plants that suited that requirement.

Garden layout draft

After much research, we settled on plants native to our location to start the project with. There were so many options to choose from for trees, shrubs and even flowers. All had the advantage of being local and hence, were suited to the unpredictable Melbourne weather. Our first ever plant shopping list was taking shape!

Inheriting a jungle!

Anshuman and I did not have green thumbs.

Our experience with plants was limited to owning a potted palm in Bangalore, which we bought to soften the look of the apartment. When the palm began to outgrow the pot, I tried to dig up the plant, embedded in the rock hard soil, with a butter knife! In the end, I smashed the pot. Miraculously, the plant still survived long enough to be divided into three pots.

Bangalore plant in it's glory days

When we moved to a suburban lifestyle in Melbourne in June 2010, we inherited a backyard garden. In effect, the ‘garden’ was a collection of overgrown weeds, ugly shrubs and prickly plants. The lawn, if you could call it that, had no grass and was waterlogged in several places. Behind the house were bald patches that received very little sunlight. Unknown creatures lurked outside in our private jungle, but we were content to let it be this way, spending our entire winter indoors.

Jungle!

Jungle!

Jungle!

All this changed when our pups arrived in April 2011. As is the nature of inquisitive puppies, they chewed on everything. We came home to chewed up leaves, bite sized wild tomatoes in their bed and paws muddy with all the digging they were doing. The final straw was when they started to get lost in the dense undergrowth!

Mischievous puppies

Mischievous puppies

Hence, we bought our very first gardening tool – a lawn mower. Alas, our mower proved to be no match for the vicious jungle. Hours spent mowing were ineffective and we were almost ready to give up the fight.

First use of lawn mower

That is when we decided to start greening our thumbs!